


Strength

by Morcai



Category: Subarashiki Kono Sekai | The World Ends With You
Genre: Alternate Interpretation?, Gen, Personification
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-02-07
Updated: 2013-02-07
Packaged: 2017-11-28 11:38:26
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 414
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/673976
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Morcai/pseuds/Morcai
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There was no obvious reason for Joshua to say Neku won the game, but Shibuya is Shibuya, and even the most unpredictable composers have those they cannot cross.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Strength

**Author's Note:**

> Fair warning: I have not collected all of the secret reports, and so this may not be compliant with canon as presented by the game.

This is why Neku Sakuraba and, by extension, his friends, are alive:

Shibuya loves Neku.

There should be no reason for that—Joshua picked Neku for more than just his misanthropy. Neku, for all the strength of his Soul and the breadth of his imagination, does not create.

But.

When he stood, smoke curling from the barrel his gun, when Neku fell gracelessly to concrete, Shibuya _howled_.

Joshua is attuned to Shibuya, always has been, but this is the first time he has heard the city react so violently for anyone not a Composer. Shibuya loves her Composer like a child loves her parent, like a dog loves her master, like art loves the unhappy. Shibuya loves Joshua without complications and almost without reserves, but she hasn’t always. She snapped and snarled and tore at him in the first decades he spent as Composer, nursing grudges for the gaping wounds left where her previous composer had guided her and been torn roughly away.

Eventually city and Composer came to suit each other, but it was a long courtship and there is still some bitterness in the city’s heart for Joshua’s actions.  


But if Shibuya loves her Composer, she loves Art more, and so Sanae Hanekoma may be a Fallen but no one will dare to take him from his city. If the city cannot predict her Composer, she can punish him, and when a bullet leaves Neku Sakuraba bleeding on the floor of the Room of Reckoning Shibuya _refuses_ —

(Cities have long memories, and Shibuya never learned forgiveness.)

City and Composer are not one and so Joshua shoots, and Neku falls and Shibuya turns rage free that rivals the fury of every dead Composer she has grieved. Joshua cannot help but be forced to his knees under the pressure of the city against his own Music. He smiles, finally, a bitter, knife-edged thing, when he realizes what the city, in her own clumsy, too loud way, is saying,

Neku does not create. He’s never needed to.

Neku Sakuraba _is_ and that is enough.

Yoshiya Kiryu can do nothing but return the boy and his friends to the RG in face of what Shibuya tells him. A city’s strength is in her people, in her art and fashion, in her skaters and her players. He will not cripple Shibuya, whom he loves as many artists love their muses.

How can Shibuya be anything but strong, now, with Inspiration walking her streets, his world wide open?


End file.
